AURORA —
The AR-15 is a lightweight, versatile rifle capable of firing a .223-caliber round at 3,200 feet per second. That’s fast enough to travel from one side of a 160-foot-wide movie theater to the other in 50 milliseconds, and much faster than the 300-millisecond blink of an eye.
Retail, the rifle will run you anywhere from $750 to $1,000. But, as a weapon, it is all but worthless without an operator.
Before the sun had risen Friday, the deaths of 12 people in an Aurora movie theater had already become the latest platform for America’s ceaseless gun debate.
If form continues to hold true, one side will use the massacre to argue that rifles like the AR-15 have no civilian purpose and are too easy to purchase, making mass slayings inevitable.
The other side will argue that if just one other patron had been armed at the midnight movie, the tragedy might have been averted by creating a death toll of only one — suspect James Eagan Holmes.
Both sides are right. But neither will ever compromise, and continuing to entertain their debate distracts us from a far more important, and perhaps even solvable, question.
We don’t yet know if the accused has been previously diagnosed as mentally ill. We have ample evidence that he is deranged.
And in the U.S. , we have scarce resources for treating mental illness and are even worse about monitoring patients who suffer from it. If we are looking for solutions to horrifying events such as Friday morning’s mass shooting, it’s a good place to start.
For the past 50 years, inpatient treatment of the mentally ill has moved from hospitals to jails.
A recent study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law noted that the number of beds available for inpatient psychiatric treatment has fallen from 339 per 100,000 Americans in 1955 to 22 per 100,000 in the year 2000.
Either we have gotten a lot saner as a nation or we have chosen to ignore the real problem. Other evidence suggests it is the latter.
Today, the percentage of our inmate population diagnosed as depressed, schizophrenic, bipolar or suffering from other psychiatric conditions stands between 16 and 24 percent, according to that same study. That is a minimum of 309,000 of our nation’s 2 million inmates who have an identified psychiatric disorder and are receiving only the bare minimum in treatment before being released at the completion of their sentences.
This is not to excuse Holmes’ alleged actions or let him hide behind a psychiatric condition to avoid punishment. On the contrary, based on some of the eyewitness accounts, the killer seemed very much in control in the theater, even making choices of victims, rather than firing indiscriminately. That, along with the booby-trap wiring at his apartment, indicates he is equal parts genius and madman.
Shouldn’t someone have noticed? Shouldn’t he have gotten help long before this? A neuroscience faculty member at the University of Colorado who spoke, anonymously (how brave!), to The Washington Post said Holmes was “very quiet, strangely quiet” in class and “socially off.” That same faculty member said he actually wasn’t surprised when he learned that the James Holmes he knew was the accused gunman. Let that sink in.
The best research into the mindset of mass killers has found that they almost invariably had high expectations for themselves, fell short and chose destruction as a means to immortality.
The little we know about Holmes tracks nicely along that path, but he hasn’t come close to achieving immortality. Beyond the grieving families making funeral arrangements and flying the flags at half staff, his impact didn’t last one full day on the broader community. By Friday afternoon, just blocks from his apartment, yard sales were underway, kids were on the playground, the swimming pool at Del Mar Park was packed to overflowing.
James Eagan Holmes is not immortal. If convicted, he won’t be remembered any more than the killers at Virginia Tech, Toronto or even Columbine have survived in our minds — and how many of those can you name?
No, Holmes is nothing but the latest horrifying reminder that we still have some big problems lurking out there.
Chuck Murphy: 303-954-1829, cmurphy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/cmurphydenpost
